Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  Or: As soon as I jumped, I hoped it would last. The freefall was amazing and over too soon. I thought here comes the water, then everything went blindingly white in sun, the water met me, and disguised as silver pleats in air, waves of late afternoon held aloft, that steepest, most restorative time of day took me in.

  Let me assure you, I did jump (or dive—specification is no longer the issue) but not like this. I didn’t go over. That used to be me. I used to jump in all kinds of ways, from trees and roofs, into slippery scenes, off edges of the known world thinking let’s see what this brings. But this isn’t me now.

  I jumped anew. Really far in. I figured the story itself, if found, would offer some solid occasions for reviewing stances I never imagined. Which is really what’s most at stake when standing before a story. So to that end, here:

  Students used to leap off the bridge all the time, then swim over to a dilapidated dock outside a boathouse on shore and dry off in the sun. The grounds manager I talked with at the university tells me the kids felt it was a romantic kind of thing to do, a rite of passage. But the dock was a mess, falling apart, and students kept tripping as they hopped from the dock to the bank of the river. One day, years ago, while taking a walk, the president saw this going on and ordered the dock removed. It was never replaced, but the bridge jumping continued. And one summer someone did drown. My contact doesn’t know who. But in trying to think of how to stop the jumping, someone (also unknown to him) came up with that sign as a deterrent. Now that I reminded him, he said, since it is in kind of bad shape, he’d talk to maintenance and see if there’s a value in keeping it up there or not. He didn’t know why kids kept bending it. Why were they so drawn to it? he wondered aloud.

  And here’s the story I was most looking for—the one that ought to overcast the bridge, crackle down doom like a slash of lightning over the spot, accompany the hunger of overhead ravens, plait through passersby with the threads of fear, loss, gratitude. At least a small wire of sadness ought to work its way in, or breeze chill bare necks, or scent settle into everyone’s sweater to mark the occasion: the story of June 15, 1995, from the Daily Iowan, written up the following day goes like this: At 5 p.m. in the afternoon, Jonathan V., nineteen, was hanging out on the bridge with friends. He left his work boots and tie-dyed Doors T-shirt on the bank and went up and jumped. When he didn’t surface, a friend leaped in to save him, dragged him toward shore, but lost his grip in the steep drop-off close to the bank. Jon was a roofer and lived with a friend’s parents, who treated him like their own son.

  He sort of filled in for the one who died huffing butane.

  He liked adventure, poetry, art. Was kind to the children. One of the girls in the family spoke for the friends, that crowd on the bridge, laughing and drinking in the late June, long summer afternoon, and gathered again at his funeral (which took place, I checked the weather report, on another perfectly composed day). She said that, to everyone there on the bridge, “it seemed like he could get out of the river if he could get in.”

  I’ve made a point of moving through the world with very few markers—no tattoos, latest haircut, religious trinkets /charms / icons (no religion, for starters), no messagey T-shirts, brands, brandings /piercings (except ears). These absences, of course, are signs in themselves, but like a turned field, I believe something more nakedly essential fills in the space, suggests things below, stirring. Suggests empty space isn’t empty at all. When the body is blank and distractions are few, gestures reveal: without a tattoo, an arm turned shows exchanges of shade and light, the internal swells of exertion/release. The way muscle tightens to counter resistance is available to the eye. Without a tattoo, one can read tilt of head, set of shoulder, tension rising or falling, and not be stopped at the surface by an ever-present joker’s grin/dagger/dragon with tail curling forever under a sleeve. A lack of signage enhances mystery. If the sign on the bridge is a bad tattoo, then even a bad tattoo has its interstices, its fleshy moments of relief, though you have to linger and look harder to see them. Even a bad sketch calls the eye to look, to stay, to ask for the story trying to surface.

  The land is seeded with incident, marked imperfectly, but even in imperfect signs, stories go on vibrating.

  That little “or” set this in motion.

  And the absences the sign offered were exactly where I formed my stances (found my scorn, and the lighthouse which softened me; found myself lacking and that I could be bettered.)

  Thought about ghosts. Showed you my research.

  Assembled the terribly brief facts of a death.

  Most moments of the story called “Last Death from Jumping or Diving” are unmarked still, not fully gathered, barely asserted. Only lightly sketched in. And, too, the moments I’ve offered here, moments constituting this piece (my own foray into jumping), also remain ill-marked. Broadly imperfect, still largely unfurled. Without extended thinking on “risk.” And that whole part about my letting stuff go, and what that might be, what else that might mean—that’s not really filled in. I know that.

  But you can stand before it nonetheless, whatever is still partial or resistant herein. You can stand before it and read, such a sign (memento mori-like, as in “there is much work to do, Lia, keep at it”) as I could come up with, here, Baltimore, MD, June 21, 2007, and I’d not be completely ashamed.

  Gray

  Here’s the cathedral, its gray stone, the gray sky, and all the gray, after-rain mottled streets. And the sky is not a cathedral bell, but also gray, gray alongside, and the icy puddles are not mirrors of sky, though sky resides in bounded ways there. It is not a cathedral tune, this tone, but the way gray wind and stone cloud together. These grays make up the right now I am in, as does the sharp uncertainty of what to do with two suddenly free hours and nowhere to be.

  All the likenesses gathering, all the things partaking each of the other, being as one, the many-in-all: no. Here, beside my uncertainty (where to go, what to do), gray underwing, stone, ice, median grass—just stay, each unto yourself. As you’re inclined: hover or seep. Crack, harrow, or blow.

  I can tell you, in my uncertainty, I won’t be listening to wind in gray branches, and conjuring far off ocean waves. I won’t be revising “here’s the gray weight of a cold afternoon” to “an afternoon, cold with the weight of gray noon. . . .” I want no gray, arterial side street contracting with old, fraught scenes, and no, no one’s absence reconstituted by cold. No snow-sky hardening its stare. No “grayly they pitched their way forward in cold”—how it must have been in pioneer times, gray woolens, gray blankets and buffalo skins, the dimming gray sky a relief from the glare, though it meant, of course, more snow coming; I do not mean to synchronize their gray anticipation with my gray anticipation.

  In this singular moment, I’ll have no church bells chased to birdcall. No gravely beautiful sidewalk, ice-cracked, with its palette of grays upriding like little headstones. No minor-key wind-hum. No cloud-spire combo of grays rising up. No parable-like breadth to all this, containing, extending, enlarging by grays.

  Just: now.

  All the gray things like only themselves.

  It’s February in Baltimore, on Mount Royal Avenue. I’ve just dropped my son at his Saturday art class. It’s almost snowing. Each gray thing in its time, in its place, stands just as it is.

  Here’s the cathedral.

  And here I am, outside, giving thanks.

  I’m starting by noting every gray thing.

  And by thanks I mean I admit I know not what to do, where to go, with all I’ve been given.

  Advice

  Dear,

  Why do some men wear such tight pants, and why are they getting tighter these days?

  My Friend,

  Men wear tight pants because their legs—thighs, calves, ankles—have been long overlooked. Note the poor ankle, stripped bare by socks rubbing. Today’s trends, or being in a band serve up an excuse for tight jeans, black, or dark blue, so men might show off a thigh’s curve. But more than
this, men who would slip into the body of a woman let their pants suggest this, whisper it, the stiff fabric hauled up over hips, which, too, have gone unremarked, slim hips, slight as a girl’s. Such a man minds not at all the mocking of his father, wants no handy loop for the hammer, doesn’t care to be handy (for this is about legs and not hands), his jeans so tight his friends laugh and say nice junk, package, stash, man. So when he sits, there’s a fold, a pressure, slight ache at the crease to remind him.

  Walking at dusk, the shadow he is passes over benches and curbs, narrows, resembles that of a woman, and again it’s that time, years ago now, when he turned sideways and was called by a girl’s name, was mistaken for her and he played along—so well, in fact, that it felt not at all like a mistake. He stages now, for himself, double takes late mornings in gardens, slant against buildings at the end of the day. He returns her, there she is, so he’s not so alone, she comes back, the steep dark of another, and he, scissory, loose-hinged, at home in the ease and expanse of his body, is she. No wind billows his cuffs (no cuffs at all, rolled or bunched, fraying, workerish, these jeans are skinny as pencils). What is she whispering, so close to him now as he rests on a stoop, bends his knees, makes a lap, brief ambient space for a dog, for a child... ? My Friend, they wear their pants tight so as to feel she’s here again. To quietly, secretly, call her back in.

  Dear,

  How can I roll around more in nuance and say the fineness of what comes to me, hovering, wordless, what we know to call thinking? So often the edges of thought get sheared, tints hardily brightened, rambles clear-cut. The time I need to meander gets claimed, touched, obligated. Then it’s tainted. And I’m left with bald statements and gist.

  My Friend,

  I have a story I want to tell you.

  And here, I almost said, “When I learned to shoot . . .” in order to talk about nuance, that fragile state you describe. It was something about holding the stock tight to my shoulder, the surprise taste of oil when I snuck a lick off the barrel—but in bringing the moment into the light, to you, to our readers, a formalness came. I mean, it took form, found a shape much too quickly. “When I learned to shoot . . .” seemed, for a moment, orderly and right as an introduction. But I’ve shot a gun only twice. The first time, into a blue sky at clay pigeons and my aim was very badly off, and the second on a farm in Poland at cans on a fence, where I hit every one. That was great, but to say “when I learned to shoot” suggests I’ve kept up—and I haven’t.

  I have to reorient now, slow down and figure out how to link up your question (I know you struggled to put it together) with my thought—hardly formed, full of promise—about shooting, the taste of gun oil, scrollwork on the stock I ran my nail over, crescent of dirt I scraped from the barrel, sun in the scope, calm of the scope’s much-narrowed world, the space there contained, the order and peace unbidden and also unnerving. I’ll have to get back to that scattery inkling, or try to shape it anew, either way, overturn that force driving toward statement, toward fixing a point, the point overtaking and bent on sealing up thought . . . and well, yes, that takes time. I see what you mean—about the circling and hovering, and how hard it is to get the world to allow it. How difficult to clear space for a ramble. To love time. To get time to love you.

  I’ll try again. A different route now.

  Leaving Chicago a few weeks ago, I saw from the window of the plane, a wall in Lake Michigan. It was parallel to the shore, I couldn’t tell how far out—a knuckle’s length from so far up, as I closed one eye and measured. It looked like an Etch A Sketch line, stylus-drawn through a silver emulsion. A boat was motoring from shore toward the wall, leaving behind a white wave that dissolved. It was hard to judge speed, but it seemed the boat wanted to sidle up very close, wanted to fold itself into the concrete. As in the airport just this morning, the woman with the prosthetic leg (leg and hip, judging by stiffness) whose skirt was worn through with three little holes where the contraption rubbed, returned to me that sensation of awkward rotation-and-pivot. In the year I wore a body cast, I, too, rubbed holes in the backs of shirts where I leaned against walls and lockers and cars. Small, precise holes where my cast was rough. Seeing that woman, I knew again (anyone might, this isn’t clarivoy-ance) what it was like to be kept far from the bodies of others. “Those little holes.” I said it only to myself. I didn’t speak the words aloud (nuance needs space to hover and roll around as you note) because how would that sound to her: I know about the holes. Those are my holes. So close were the holes all these years! Who knew I’d enter them again, that I’d kept them for just this moment so I might seal up the distance between my body and hers.

  My Friend, such moments do survive. Give them air. Let them play unsupervised in the field of the body. Keep the tasks of the day aside for as long as you can. Feed silence. Invite time. Resist gist.

  Dear,

  The other day I wanted to give my body away. Why? I’m not, as they used to say, a “loose woman.”

  My Friend,

  Wasn’t it you, who wrote a short time ago saying you felt not at all in possession of your body? But that it wasn’t death, either, you meant, nor was it another form of detachment or dissociation. And when you were sitting beside a man whose grand loss was known to all, that worst of all losses, a whole family gone instantly, tragically taken . . . wasn’t it then that your own surface slid? And you found no reason to dig into why, or interpret, pathologize, justify. You just wanted to give. I read in the paper the other day (yes, this very same paper that runs this column) a strange, then very right-seeming thing. These people who’d been volunteering at a local soup kitchen for seventeen years said, “We almost don’t know why we come here, we’ve been coming here so long. . . .” They call the hungry men “Sir” and the women “Ma’am.” They serve up big portions, set places, clear tables, and scrub out the pots. They are not full of pity. Or no longer are. It’s just easy, habitual giving and doing.

  Wouldn’t you want it be, to him, a relief? Wasn’t it that your body, just then, needed not one single thing? Only to give, to offer itself. After much generosity of the daily kind (small things matter, too: take in mail for the neighbors, water plants, listen well), your body meant to extend itself further. Into. Another. Be for another. This is, after all, an advice column. Who writes and asks who hasn’t lost something, or isn’t afraid of losses to come, or is presently losing and lacks the will to believe it?

  Once I sat next to a man on a train whose back didn’t work well—it must have been fused, it stayed rigid as he rose from his seat—and he looked to be in great pain. He held his side with one hand and his head with the other; he rested his head against the train window to redistribute the weight and the pressure, but his breath was still fitful. He stretched a little, as much as he could, then angled stiffly back into his seat where he sighed very deeply. And of that relief, I knew this: it’s momentary. All that positioning for a moment of respite.

  A dose of respite so the wincing would stop, so the loss would cease, is what you’d be, right, for the man you just wrote of? A place to lean into and breathe—your hair, if it’s long, or your neck with its oceany warmth, scent of grass because we’re all going (really going, or wanting to go sooner because of the pain), that bit of relief, so pain in its constancy might be put off, it’s edges worn softer—you’d be that. You’d get to be part of the moment, the site at which even a brief ease asserted.

  Yes, Friend, it’s criminal to hold back, stay apart, when one might give and give and give. But we’ve set this up for the greater good. For the worth of other intactnesses, for the sake of family and order, and country, the body is barred from some forms of giving. For all the body learns to bar, Amen, we learn to say.

  So your useless, beautiful body behaves. You stay still—as anyone might—in the shivery, mutinous light of loss. Light in gimcracks through fall’s granite clouds. Light sliding along the bent ribs of pumpkins. Loss translucing the sugar from maples, the tender backlit leaves aflare. Light
rashing us all, slow, fretted and grand. Friend, it’s hard to imagine the body in pain when it isn’t. Or when you’re sweating on a subway in August, hard to conjure the distant and soundless cold mornings of winter.

  I believe our best work on earth is in service of likeness. I don’t know what to call it—moments of interpenetration? To feel the exchange across borders. You’re writing, I think, to say how much you want to work for such a cause. Readers, a challenge: hear past your associations with the word penetrate; break it down, past the brutish, go back to its origins: “to place within, to enter within, related to penitus: interior, in-most, the in-most recesses.” To enter, to be entered is a beautiful thing. Though, yes, how hard to contain complications when bodies are involved. Thanks, Friend, for writing.

  Dear,

  I’m writing again. I’m not finished, though your answer was good. You’re right. It is hard. Why is it so especially hard to convince others I’d want nothing in return for the body’s work. Enough to be the passage through which alleviation moves. Which feels ancient, and clean, like the form of a simple canoe, mano, plinth. Or a very brief poem, a fragment, a moment so full it needs no expounding—Heraclitus’ “the harmony past knowing/sounds more deeply than the known” for example.

  My Friend,

  Perhaps we should consider the aqueducts of Rome for a moment. These days, in Romavecchia, a suburb just north of the city, runners use the precisely spaced arches to mark distance, dogs piss against them, kids slouch and kiss and smoke under the yellowing stone. In the past, in their time, aqueducts filled the baths, fountains, public drinking spouts of Rome, watered terraces, flushed the entire city’s sewer system—ah, to make with the body such a system of response, a tonic, balm, respite! (Heraclitus back at you—“Silence, healing.”) My Friend, it’s a structural question you’re asking. How a thing stands up to time, adapts, changes. Shows itself to be a passage, and useful, anew.